The Last Ride Of Anyone Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Fireworks,
Like insects of men,
Like a field of smoking muskets-
Everything done well in life
At first looks beautiful,
Exploding like bright seeds out of
Scarred palms,
And then is done in seconds:
I drink cheap rum to try and be fashionable,
To socialize with shadows,
While my dog licks my shoe-less foot-
I can walk for miles and miles
And escape all the cops,
The blue-green men with their gunshot smiles.
I played minigolf, or I loved her,
But she took off and married a harlequin
Romance- now they live and work
In the South Florida gutter:
This strange feat is my bread and butter,
And the world turns around underfoot-
When the substitute is in house, all busty and silver,
I tend to stutter-
I write novels late in the evening, I return Sherlock
Holmes weeks afterward, piss-stained,
And the Librarians tend to complain,
But I do not wonder: By the end of the year I will
Have my own house curled in a cul-de-sac,
And I will attend new classes in the evening;
All alone in a house with my dog,
I will drink rum from coffee mugs,
I will imagine myself with her-
And the world will be pulled out from under me like
A rug,
But I’ll just tilt my jug and salute:
For the earth is bright in turning, like blown glass still
Burning, and when I trust my poetry in the old-model
Factory,
I feel like Robert Frost, choosing the wrong path
From the two,
Until I cannot feel anything, and then I just imagine her
Lips embracing the apple of my neck
Like an adolescent hummingbird adulating in
Verse,
Until I cannot feel anything-
And the sky is only the penumbra, a word appropriate
For dour verse:
The last ride of anyone, the final car,
The body reclined in the back of the hearse,
The long hike up the smoky mountain,
The last sip of verse.